A dozen years after the political and theatrical watershed of 1956 came those further shifts in social thinking of 1968. which were also reflected in major changes on the theatrical scene. Another twelve years on, any theatre people who were expecting such a collision of events in 1980 appeared to be waiting in vain. Yet, in retrospect, the impact of that first full year of a new kind of Conservative government can be seen as no less decisive, though its effects on the theatrical scene are only now beginning to make a kind of negative sense. Here, Vera Gottlieb argues that the tone of ‘Thatcher's theatre’ was already being set by such earlier plays as Peter Shaffer's Equus, in which she detects both the despair of rational solutions and the willing subjection to supposedly implacable forces that have since become characteristic of our national theatre as of our national mood. Vera Gottlieb. who is Principal Lecturer in Drama at Goldsmiths’ College. University of London, is the author of Chekhov and the Vaudeville (Cambridge, 1982), is presently collaborating with Peter Holland on a study of Stanislavsky as director, and has been co-author and director of Red Earth (Hampstead, 1985) and Waterloo Road (Young Vic Studio. 1987).

Founded by John Fox in Bradford in 1968, Welfare State International – WSI for short – is a consortium of freelance associates, many of whom have a fine art background. Funded by the Arts Council to research prototype forms of visual, celebratory theatre and ceremonial art, the company has achieved an international reputation for its original and pioneering work, having worked for and with communities throughout Britain and Europe, and as far afield as Japan, Australia, the USA, Canada, and Tanzania. Handcrafted celebratory events may variously incorporate specially made pyrotechnic animations, iceworks, architectural lanterns, carnival orchestras, oratorios of popular song, clay grottoes, mobile tableaux of performance art, theatrical transformations, surreal films, and infernal sculptural machines. WSI has consistently explored the territory between theatrical product and applied anthropology. In the original series of Theatre Quarterly, a feature in TQ8 (1972), compiled by John Fox, described and illustrated the company's early years, and in 1983 Tony Coult and Baz Kershaw edited a ‘Welfare State Handbook’ for Methuen, entitled Engineers of the Imagination. As the company celebrates its twentieth anniversary, its Development Director, Michael White, looks at some current directions and preoccupations in WSI's work and thinking.

Caryl Churchill began her playwriting career for radio in the ‘sixties’, became a writer for live theatre in association with such companies as Monstrous Regiment and, notably. Joint Stock – and recently achieved her greatest commercial success with the transfer to Wyndhams Theatre of her play about the City. Serious Money, premiered at the Royal Court in March 1987 in a production by Max Stafford-Clark. In conversation here with Geraldine Cousin, she sketches in the early years of her career and the different demands of radio and stage plays, discusses some of her recurrent themes and preoccupations, weighs how far she feels herself a ‘woman writer’, and describes the collaborative approach of working with Joint Stock. She then talks in more detail not only about Serious Money, but her earlier collaboration with David Lan (author of Flight. Sergeant Ola and His Followers, and The Winter Dancers) – a variation upon the Bacchae theme, A Mouthful of Birds, directed by Les Waters and lan Spink. The interviewer, Geraldine Cousin, teaches in the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick.

Both in his practical work with Odin Teatret, and his close involvement with ISTA, the International School of Theatre Anthropology. Eugenio Barba has developed an approach to theatre which is highly personal in expression, yet far-sightedly comparative in its concern with the nature of the actor's work and the ways in which it crosses cultural and other divides. An Advisory Editor of NTQ, Eugenio Barba contributed earlier pieces on the nature of the actor's energies to NTQ 4 and NTQ 11, and now further develops his thinking, in a consideration of what he calls ‘the body-in-life’, and the balance between its ‘three vital organs’ which is essential if the actor is to realize his full potential.

For many theatregoers whose sensibilities were shaped by the new theatre writing of the late ‘fifties, the adaptation in 1963 of Shakespeare's first tetralogy of history plays into the three-play cycle The Wars of the Roses came as a startling revelation of the ‘political’ Shakespeare. Directed for the still-fledgling RSC by Peter Hall and John Barton, with the latter also responsible for the adaptation and revision, the sequence was perhaps most memorable for the performance by Peggy Ashcroft as Queen Margaret-Shakespeare's ‘first heroine’ –whose presence first illuminated and then haunted the production. Robert Potter, who now teaches in the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, encountered the production while on a Fulbright scholarship to England, and here recollects in tranquility the disturbing impression of Ashcroft's performance, and its impact upon our understanding of the plays. Robert Potter, who as a practising playwright made his own adaptation of the Roses sequence in 1977, has also published widely in the field of medieval drama, and wrote on theAbraham and Isaac play as presented in Aztec Mexico in NTQ 8.

It is now twenty-one years since Joe Orton's death, though his relatively slender theatrical output has retained its freshness and power. After the modest West End success achieved by his first play to reach the stage. Entertaining Mr. Sloane, the New York production proved a failure, and the interview given by Orton to Glenn Loney in New York in October 1965, a few days before the Broadway opening, therefore went unpublished at the time. We print it now, as an intriguing sidelight on the attitudes and opinions of the playwright. It is placed in context by the widely-published theatre critic and teacher Glenn Loney, who also describes the brief, mainly epistolatory friendship with Orton that sprang from this first meeting.

Is the ‘Performance art’ whose influence is pervasive in today's American theatre truly in the ‘tradition’ of the avant-garde – or merely modish? In an age where fashions, whether in theatre, clothing. or motor cars. are manufactured to facilitate the turnover necessary for mass-produced obsolescence, does ‘imagist’ theatre serve as a force for social change – or merely titillate palates as jaded by yesterday's art as by yesterday's styles? R. G. Davis looks at the ways in which visually- oriented forms of theatre have been constructed and received in America since the ‘happenings’ of the early ‘sixties – and at the changing political climate since that time, which has itself modified the impact of any artistic statement. He asks whether the progressive theatre worker should in today's reactionary climate regard such forms as suspect, or look for ways of harnessing them to the creation of a ‘dialectical view of pleasure’ through the multi-faceted potential of epic theatre. R. G. Davis, who was founding director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the 'sixties, is a leading director of Brecht and, more recently, of Dario Fo in the United States, and is currently directing his adaptation of llya Ehrenburg'sLife of the Automobile as an imagistc theatre piece. He has been a regular contributor to TQ and NTQ.

Largely as a result of the experimentation and stability of the university theatres founded in the early 'forties, Chilean theatre is among the best-established in Latin America. But how far has its survival since 1973 depended on the regime's sense of the theatre's relative impotence to effect change? Little is known about Chilean theatre in Britain, few plays have been translated, and with rare exceptions those that have found their way here have been limited to ‘solidarity’ audiences. In this article. Catherine M. Boyle, who teaches in the Department of Modern Languages of the University of Strathclyde, considers the various kinds and qualities of theatre that have been produced in Chile since 1973, and draws some conclusions about the nature of freedom of expression and its repression.

Too often, western thinking about the Polish theatre is limited by its ‘exportable’ names – or, more insidiously, by the expectation that it should satisfy our own assumptions about how theatre ‘ought’ to be participating in the national struggle. Zygmunt Hubner is probably more typical of theatre professionals in Poland. As director of the Powszechny Theatre in Warsaw, he neither supports the government, nor regards himself primarily as a maker of ‘political’ theatre: and here he describes the dilemma of the theatre worker who, while depending on state subsidy, nevertheless wishes to speak to his audiences in ways that matter. It is a dilemma which seems scarcely less conducive to arousing a ‘professional's guilty conscience’ in the theatre of the so-called ‘free world’.

In Spain, alone among western nations, political theatre has arguably had a real impact upon the course of social and political change – yet it remains little noticed or assessed in other countries. This article examines the leading Spanish theatre groups which operated first in Franco's declining years, under strict though often incompetent government censorship, then in the period of transition to democracy – and now facing very different challenges under a nominally socialist government. The author. Eugène van Erven, who contributed a study of the popular theatre movement in the Philippines to NTQ 10, focuses in particular on the work of El Joglars (‘The Jesters’) from Barcelona – a company which, under the leadership of Albert Boadella, has been performing almost continuously since 1962. at first subverting the censorship by evolving a style of ‘politicized mime’, then through controversial works on overtly political themes, and more recently in a ‘provocative’ style intended to engage audiences in an active process of questioning the consumerist direction being taken by a democratic Spain.

‘Catharsis’ remains one of the several concepts employed by Aristotle in the Poetics whose precise meaning and implications have tantalized critics over the centuries. But all too often ‘catharsis’ has largely been discussed as a process which occurs to the audience of a tragedy: in this article, Ian Watson looks instead at the different forms it may take (and the differences in underlying intentions) so far as performers are concerned. He relates his ideas to forms of dramatic experience as discrete as psychodrama, and to schools of acting from Stanislavski to Grotowski.

In June 1985, a fortnight's discussions on ‘The Theatre in the Future’ were held as part of the Fools' Festival in Copenhagen. The seminars discussed the position of theatre and its possibilities in a rapidly changing society, often from deeply opposed positions – socially engaged versus wildly avant-garde, verbal versus imagistic, anthropological versus robotic, and so on. Participants were an exciting mix of professional performers of many kinds, plus theatre critics and ‘ordinary’ engaged people, who for two weeks exchanged experiences and visions of theatre in conjunction with other art forms, and with science and politics. The manifesto below was the contribution to these seminars of John Andreasen, a veteran of ‘sixties happenings, who has subsequently concentrated on street and environmental theatre, and for the past twelve years has taught and directed in the Drama Department of the University of Aarhus.

Interest in Charles Laughton has recently been revived by the publication of Simon Callow's biography (Methuen, 1987), in which the author quoted from the personal recollections of a teacher. Ken Carter, whose view of Laughton's Stratford performance as Lear in 1959 ran counter to the critical dismissals which have otherwise come down to us. Carter expanded his views for a short article published in Drama (4–1987), and now provides a fuller account of a performance recollected in remarkable detail after almost thirty years. An Oxford graduate, Ken Carter has worked mainly as a teacher in London, with interludes near Bath and in Madrid.

Playwrights in the West remain under threat not only from the ever-increasing dominance of the director and the loss of autonomy carried over from film and television, but from sheer economic deprivation – which makes playwriting impossible as a full-time profession for most of its members. Is the best way to remedy this the assertion of collective responsibility and power advocated in this country by the Theatre Writers Union, or by a frank acceptance that artistic strength is seldom likely to be matched by economic or ‘political’ power – as James L. Rosenberg now argues? NTQ does not necessarily endorse the viewpoint here expressed, but feels that it is a forceful statement of a ‘new realism’ about the role of the playwright in the likely western future – in this respect also making an illuminating contrast to the foregoing article by Zygmunt Hübner. The author, James L. Rosenberg, is a widely-performed American dramatist, who has also translated numerous plays from the German, and is presently Visiting Professor of Theatre at Williams College. Williamstown, Massachusetts.

In recent years, melodrama has increasingly been recognized not only as an important element in popular theatre studies, but for the intrinsic importance of the form itself. Less considered has been the relationship of the material of melodrama to the ‘real life’ it reflected in a highly conventionalized yet ultimately (for its audiences), recognizable fashion. Here, Jim Davis looks at one major category, nautical melodrama, setting the images of the navy and of sailors that it created alongside factual and critical accounts of life at sea in the first half of the nineteenth century. He conveys both the pressures that existed for redress of abuses, and the consequent balance between coercion and subversion in the melodramas themselves – drawing in particular on the memoirs of Douglas Jerrold to explore aspects of the ambiguity to be found in contemporary attitudes. Jim Davis, who is the author of several books and articles in the area of nineteenth century theatre history, is presently teaching in the School of Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales.

In the earlier instalments of this series of articles, published in NTQ 11 and 12, Rustom Bharucha described. first, how he and fellow director Manuel Lutgenhorst became fascinated with the idea of transposing Franz Xaver Kroetz's play without words. Request Concert, about the last evening in the life of a very ordinary German woman. into a variety of social contexts in his native India. He then provided detailed descriptions of the productions as realized under their direction in Calcutta and Bombay, revealing the very difficult kinds of insight they offered both into the theatrical potential of the play, and the different natures of the urban societies to which it was being adapted. The performances of Usha Ganguli in Calcutta and of Sulabha Deshpande in Bombay – themselves strongly contrasting both in actorly approach and in realization – were followed in Madras, in a production by Lutgenhorst. by the very different interpretation of the dancer Chandralekha, who brought to the play the energies and disciplines of Bharat Natyam. revealing yet other stylistic possibilities and sustaining a creative tension between these possibilities and the surface realism of the play.

What happens during a rehearsal? How are actors' expectations and achievements affected by different directorial approaches, and how do the various ‘systems’ of acting fit with the responses of an audience? From Diderot through Stanislavski. Brecht. and Artaud to the work of such modern experimental directors as Brook, Grotowski, Chaikin, and Schechner, the theory may or may not be adequately tested against the practice. The author of two earlier, complementary studies in empirical theatre research – ‘Feedback as a Subsystem’ and ‘Prompt–Copy as a Subsystem’, both published in Kodikas/Code: Ars Semeiotica (1984 and 1987) – Stratos E. Constantinidis here checks several normative fallacies which have influenced theatre practice by relating the findings of empirical research in theatre to the experimental work of theatre artists. The author, who has previously worked in the Universities of Iowa and Arizona, presently teaches theory and criticism in the Department of Theatre at Ohio State University.

In his major work on Theatre Games (Methuen, 1977), Clive Barker provided both a practical textbook on the uses of game-playing for actors, and some theoretical background to its value. There, he largely stressed the function of games as a means to an end – the development of acting skills, and the enrichment of the rehearsal process. But, partly as a result of the book's appearance, he has also conducted many one-off ‘game workshops’, often for groups whose concerns are not primarily or professionally theatrical: and in the following article he discusses the value that game-playing still seems to have for such groups, by close analogy with the function of the ‘kissing-games’ of his own childhood and adolescence – as a means of breaking down inhibitions within a context that is both socially acceptable and controlled. Clive Barker, whose career in the professional theatre began with Joan Littlewoods's Theatre Workshop company, is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly, and now teaches in the Joint School of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick.

The parodos is the first appearance of the Chorus in a classical Greek drama, an occurrence common to tragedy, comedy – and that curious hybrid form, of which very few examples are extant, the satyr play. One of the two complete surviving, texts is the Ichneutai or Searching Satyrs of Sophocles: and in the following exercise in literary detection. Paola Polesso bases her investigation of the play not only on linguistic evidence but on clues which emerge from seeing the play in performance, to suggest the chronological context with in which the play may now be more precisely placed. Dr. Polesso, who presently teaches drama in the University of Bologna, has acted as assistant director to Luca Ronconi, and has been a contributor to numerous Italian theatre journals.

In NTQ 13, David Allen began his exploration of the diverse approaches to Chekhóv by modern British directors with an analysis of Mike Alfreds's work on the plays. Here, he looks in detail at the production of one of Chekhov's least-revived but most controversial works. Ivanov, by David Jones. This revival, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, opened at the Aldwych Theatre. London, on 2 September 1976, with John Wood in the title role. David Allen places the production in the context of Chekhov's own comments on the play and its characters, of contemporary Russian society, and of earlier British productions: he then intercuts his own act-by-act description of Jones's production with the comments and recollections of the director and his leading players.